7

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‌CHAPTER 7

7 July 1979 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

[Lalirra means waterhole in Australian Aboriginal.] Deva Lalirra – a divine source of water.

In all the primitive tribes water symbolizes life. Life is based on water: the human body is eighty-five percent water. And life depends – the life of animals and the trees and man and birds – all life depends on water. So water was one of the basic elements to be worshipped. Just as the sun was worshipped by all primitive people, water was also worshipped; both were respected as gods. And it is significant as a metaphor also.

Water represents a few things. One: it has no form, yet it can take any form, it is capable of adjusting into any form. You pour it into a pot, it takes the form of the pot; you pour it into a glass, it takes the form of the glass. It is infinitely adjustable. That’s its beauty: it knows no rigidity. And man should be so unrigid, unfrozen, like water, not like ice.

Water is always moving towards the sea. Wherever it is, its movement is always towards the sea, towards the infinite. Man should be like water, always moving towards God. Water remains pure if it moves and flows; it becomes impure, stagnant, if it becomes dormant. So should be man and his consciousness, always flowing, moving, never becoming stuck anywhere.

It is by getting stuck that man becomes dirty, impure. If the flow remains and one is ready to move from one moment to another moment without any hang-ups, without carrying the load of the past, one remains innocent, pure.

Prem Lili. Prem means love, lili has many meanings; it is a very pregnant word. The most ancient meaning, the original meaning, is paradise. The lily represents paradise; it represents something of

the beyond. It is of the earth and yet not of the earth. It is so divine, its beauty is so transcendental; its grace is God’s grace.

In Christianity the lily represents innocence chastity, purity. And in Greek mythology lily represents life and resurrection. Life is eternal, you cannot destroy it. It resurrects itself. That’s exactly the meaning of Jesus’ crucifixion and resurrection: life cannot be killed. On one hand you crucify it, on the other hand it resurrects again. Eternity is its intrinsic core. The flower, lily, simply represents the coming of life again and again and again.

Just meditating on the flower you will feel an innocence arising in you, a purity, because whatsoever we meditate upon we become like. Meditation means getting utterly involved with something, so much so that the observer becomes the observed. Then something like a lily flower opens in your heart. Then not only on the outside, but in your inner being a fragrance arises.

But all these meanings can be contained in the original meaning: paradise. And only love can create paradise; paradise is nothing but a creation of love. Without love there is only hell. Because love exists it is enough proof that heaven exists.

Heaven is not something geographical, neither is hell geographical. They are psychological states: nothing in the objective world but something in the subjective. When you are in love you are in heaven; when you are not in love you are in hell. And it all depends on you – to live in hell or to live in heaven.

Becoming a sannyasin simply means that now you are choosing heaven, that now you will remain constantly aware not to choose hell. Of course many times you will fall and falter; that is not to be worried about. The moment you remember, again drop choosing hell. The moment you catch yourself red-handed choosing hell, immediately withdraw.

Don’t choose anger, don’t choose greed, don’t choose jealousy, don’t choose possessiveness; they are all parts of hell. Choose love and all the companions of love: sympathy, compassion, service, prayer, meditation. Create a paradise inside yourself.

Man’s creativity is fulfilled only when paradise is created inside. One can paint beautiful pictures and yet may live in hell. Van Gogh painted beautiful pictures and committed suicide; he lived constantly in hell. Many poets, like Mayakovsky and others, have written beautiful poems but committed suicide. Life must have been horrible. Their poetry was only superficial; their being could not become poetry. Great philosophers have gone mad, committed suicide, like Friedrich Nietzsche. Their philosophical understanding did not help. Only one thing is helpful: that I call love.

Love infinitely. Love without any miserliness, because it is not a treasure that is exhaustible. In fact the more you give it, the more you have it. It is one of the most fundamental paradoxes of life: keep it, and you lose it; give it, and you have it.

[The new sannyasin is seven months pregnant and says she would like to prepare for the birth of the child.]

So don’t do any groups, mm? Just be here, and be as relaxed as possible.…

If you cannot meditate, then sit at the side of where meditation is happening. Absorb as much meditative energy as possible. Remain relaxed and cheerful, as if no other world exists and no worry exists. Absorb as much energy from the sannyasins as possible, and the child will be nourished, spiritually nourished.

You have come at the right time!

Anand Joaquin. Anand means bliss; joaquin means the lord is the judge.

The Hebrew idea behind the concept that God is the judge is of great importance. It means that no man has the authority to judge. You should not judge – judgment is to be left in God’s hands. And we go on judging. We go on saying: This is right and that is wrong, and this should be done and that should not be done. This is an ego trip. If God is the only judge, then who are we to decide? And how can we decide? – we don’t know the whole story.

Life is so complicated that you only become acquainted with a part. You may have even lived with the person for your whole life, you become acquainted only with a part of his behavior. You don’t know his intentions and you don’t know his unconscious, and even the behavior is not known to you in its totality.

It is almost like you tear a page from a novel: you read it, and you judge the novel. That judgment will be absurd, because you cannot judge by one page. You will not know anything by the single page, you will not know the story before and after. And that’s how we know people: we know only very small fragments.

Even lovers don’t know each other in their totality. In fact it is impossible to know the other in his totality. Only God can know the total. Only he can read your whole soul like a story, from the beginning to the end. And without that, every judgment is wrong.

So the first thing is to remember not to judge. Jesus says: Judge ye not. He even says: Don’t even judge evil. If it appears absolutely wrong, then too don’t judge... because it is such a complex existence. Something may look evil and may not be, and something may look good and may not be. Things are complicated. And everything is only a part of a long chain: one never knows how it began and how it is going to end. Only because God knows the whole, can he judge.

And the second thing is: God can judge because God is love. When love judges, nothing ever goes wrong, because love knows how to forgive. Love forgives absolutely. Because it can forgive, it can judge. You cannot forgive, hence you cannot judge.

God is love. We can open our hearts to God. We can stand in utter nudity before him with absolute certainty that we will be forgiven. He is love and compassion: these two things are implied in the idea. Both are of tremendous beauty. The first will prevent you from judging others, and the second will encourage you to open your heart. No need to hide, no need to cover oneself. No need to be afraid: God is love and God is the judge.

There is a famous Sufi story:

A man has just got married and he is coming home with his wife. They are crossing a lake in a boat, and suddenly a storm arises. The man is a warrior, but the woman becomes very afraid. It seems that life is finished: the boat is small and the storm is really huge, and any moment they are going to be drowned. But the man sits silently, calm and quiet, as if nothing is happening.

The woman is trembling and she says, “Are you not afraid? This may be our last moment of life! It doesn’t seem that we will be able to reach the other shore. Only some miracle can save us, otherwise death is certain. Are you not afraid? Are you mad or something? Are you a stone or something?”

The man laughs and takes the sword out of its sheath. The woman is even more puzzled: what he is doing? He brings the naked sword close to the woman’s neck – so close that just a small gap is there, it is almost touching her neck. He said, “Are you afraid?” She starts giggling and laughing and she says, ‘Why should I be afraid? If the sword is in your hands, why should I be afraid? I know you love me.’

He put the sword back and he said, “This is my answer. I know God loves, and the sword is in his hands, the storm is in his hands, so whatsoever is going to happen is going to be good. If we survive, good; if we don’t survive, good, because everything is in his hands and he cannot do anything wrong.”

This is the trust that a sannyasin needs to imbibe. Such tremendous trust is capable of transforming your whole life. Only such tremendous trust is capable of transforming your life; less than that won’t do.

Anand Nirup. Anand means bliss; nirup means formless. Bliss is not a thing, hence it can’t have a form. Bliss is an experience, just like love or beauty or joy. It is formless, but it can be experienced in many forms. It itself is intrinsically formless, therefore it can be experienced in many forms. Only something formless can be experienced in many forms. If something has a particular form, then it can be experienced only in that particular form.

Fire is fire and always fire, and water is water and always water. But bliss can be many things because it is not a particular thing. You can have it as poetry, you can have it as music; you can have it as love, you can have it as meditation. You can have it in thousand-and-one ways and thousand-and-one forms.

Try to have it in as many forms as possible. Slowly slowly you will become aware that although it is coming from poetry or music or love, it is the same thing, it is the same fragrance. Poetry is only a vehicle, music is another vehicle, love still another, but that which comes in those vehicles is the same. The message is the same; the medium is different. And the day one understands this: that it is the same bliss that comes in thousand-and-one forms, one has understood that God exists as bliss and comes in thousand-and-one forms.

Bliss is the experience of God; bliss means that you have tasted something of God. Bliss means that God is. And one should be capable of knowing bliss in as many forms as possible; then one’s experience of God becomes richer and richer.

In the past the religious person remained one-dimensional; he found God only in one single form. And all the religions have chosen their forms. For example, there are religions that have used music, there are religions that have used dance. There are religions that are absolutely against music and dance, and their only meditation is to sit silently, utterly silently, unmoving. There are religions that have tried to find God through love, and there are religions that have tried to find God through absolute lovelessness, detachment.

My sannyasin has to taste all kinds of wine available; he has to become a connoisseur of wines. Nothing has to be left unexperienced, so God becomes a multidimensional, multi-colorful experience; so God becomes the whole rainbow, all the colors, all the notes of music. Then only will a total man be born on the earth, who will be capable of opening all the windows and all the doors to existence.

Why worship through only one window? Why remain poor? When the whole is available, why choose the part, and why cling to the part?

So my sannyasin has to be a Christian, a Mohammedan, a Buddhist, a Jain, a Jew, a Zoroastrian, a Taoist. My sannyasin has to be all these things, and yet not confined to any form. The search is for the formless through forms.

[A sannyasin says he is disturbed because has not made any close friends here. He has done Kyo group, and learnt how to meditate on his own, but still feels lonely.]

And you don’t feel good being lonely?...

No, relationship will simply bring misery to you, it will make you miserable. It will make you tense, although you will not feel empty because you will be full of tensions, and occupied. In fact many people go on living in relationship because it gives a feeling of fullness. Although they are only full of anxiety, tension, conflict, at least something is better than nothing: that is their idea. So they go on clinging. If they move from one relationship they immediately start another, because whenever they are alone they feel afraid of falling into an abyss. And that abyss is your real being!

So if relationship leads you into that abyss it is good; if relationship becomes an escape from that abyss it is bad.

And there are two kinds of people, two types of people. One type will find it helpful to be in relationship, because every relationship throws him back into himself. He rebounds from the relationship; it does not become his occupation. In fact without it he will not be able to find his own self; it becomes a mirror. That is one type. The other type is the type for whom the relationship becomes an occupation and a distraction from himself.

And that’s what will happen to you. It’s perfectly good to be alone: enjoy it! My own observation is that if you start enjoying it you will be tremendously happy being alone, far happier than so-called lovers – less occupied certainly; because you are alone, you are less occupied. If you are in search of an occupation, that’s another thing! Then why one girlfriend? – two, three girlfriends, so more occupation, more conflict and jealousy and fight... and you almost become a football!

If you want to do that, next time you come that is possible! I will put four women after you! They will teach you your lesson: for your whole life you will never think about women again! That’s the whole device here... And I have dangerous women too! But my feeling is that you look so innocent – it is better to avoid relationship.

Start enjoying your aloneness, make it a meditation. Yes, the way of the arhat is your way, not the way of the bodhisattva.…

Meditate more, rather than doing groups. And if you want to do some groups; then do groups like Vipassana – meditative groups.…

Even in the West if you can find some places – there are few places where Vipassana can be done. And there are Zen retreats, if you can find some. But find something which teaches you how to be more alone and to enjoy your aloneness, not western type of groups – Encounter, etcetera – they won’t help you. They will simply make you more miserable because they will teach you to relate: if you don’t relate you are dead! Then you will start feeling that you are dead because you don’t relate, and it will bring misery and guilt in you. And if you try to relate you will not be happy; that is not going to fit your nature at all.

If people exactly know their type, things become very simple. And that’s the function of the Master: to decide the type. How will you know what is going to be your destiny? But I can see absolutely clearly – there are no two opinions about you. It is very simple: you can follow the path of the arhat and be alone and enjoy it.

Next time you come, remind me.

Keep it (a box) with you, and whenever you start forgetting what I have said, put it on your heart. [A sannyasin is visiting for the first time, and says: I am very happy to be here in your presence.] That’s good! I am also happy.

When the disciple is happy the Master is happy, because the circle is complete!

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